NVIDIA has officially revealed two new Quadro professional graphics cards for the scientific and engineering workstation market - the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800. As you can see below, they are not meant for your hot-rod gaming machines, but rather the engineering and scientific communities. In other words, folks with loads of money.

So what do the two new Quadro cards offer over their predecessors? Principally, they are based on the new GT200 GPU, which is used in desktop graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 280 and the GeForce GTX 260. Hence, they would be more powerful, thanks to the higher number of stream processors. Of course, NVIDIA just had to tack on the CUDA brand name to make them sound better than their desktop parts.

The truth is, these cards are really nothing but the "professional" equivalents of the GeForce GTX 280 and the GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards. Hardware-wise, the GPUs used in both desktop and professional cards are the same. What NVIDIA terms as "CUDA parallel computing processors" is nothing but a fancy pansy name for the stream processors in the GPU.

If we are to talk of these cards in desktop equivalents, then the Quadro 5800 would correspond to the GeForce GTX 280 while the Quadro 4800 would be equivalent to the GeForce GTX 260. The Quadro cards do have larger memory buffers though, with the new Quadro 5800 boasting 4 GB of graphics memory.